"Reasonableness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Washington, following some tentative gestures in that direction, accepted the new dispensation outright. In Smyth v. Ames decided that year, partially overturning Munn v. Illinois, it gave notice of its intention to review in detail the "reasonableness" of railway rates set by State authority and in Holden v. Hardy it ratified, at the same term, the doctrine of freedom of contract.[70] The result of the two holdings for the Court's constitutional jurisdiction ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... seemed to him that he had never talked to anyone who possessed more of that sweetness and wide reasonableness of outlook upon life which ought to be the end of education. He tried to express something of what he felt, but Hope stopped him and turned the talk into ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... her daughter, who sat motionless, with her hands clasped. Then she was filled with the spirit of reasonableness and sense: all this tragic to-do about what might never happen seemed to her ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... was when there was no time—something existed when there was nothing, which something created everything; its advocates would be tongue-tied and lost if reduced to the hard necessity of appealing to facts, or rigidly regarding rules of philosophising, which have only their reasonableness to recommend them. They profess ability to account for nature, and are of course exceedingly eager to justify a profession so presumptuous. This eagerness betrays them into courses, of which no one bent ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... concessions, monopolies, railways, and mines, and endeavouring to get their claims supported by gunboats. The Chinese are not, as a rule, good soldiers, because the causes for which they are asked to fight are not worth fighting for, and they know it. But that is only a proof of their reasonableness. ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... Captain Montague was exceedingly strict, although the strength of his first suspicions had been somewhat abated by the truthful tone and aspect of Gascoyne, and the apparent reasonableness of all he said; but he failed to detect anything in the papers, or in the general arrangements of the Foam, that could warrant his treating her otherwise than ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... credibility attaching to witnesses circumstanced as they were, whose separation of canonical from uncanonical gospels, or rather their canonizing of certain writings apart from others, and their claiming of inspiration for the authors of the former, must be judged by the reasonableness of the thing itself, in connection with men of their type. The second century abounded in pseudonymous literature; and the early fathers, as well as the churches, were occupied with other things than the sifting of evidence ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... touch with the mass of the people. But when his gaunt and homely form rose to deliver the inaugural address, it was as a little-known and untried man that he was heard. That speech gave signal that the man for the hour had come. No words could better describe its quality than "sweet reasonableness";—that, and unflinching purpose. He began by earnest reassurances as to the fidelity to the Constitution of himself and the party behind him. He suggested the means and temper by which mutual grievances might be ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... MODERATIONEM ... AEQUITATEM: 'the self-control and even balance of your mind'. Moderatio is in Cic. a common translation of [Greek: sophrosyne]. Aequitas is not used here in its commonest sense of 'reasonableness' or 'equity', but as the noun corresponding to aequus in the ordinary phrase aequus animus (Horace, 'aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem'), cf. Tusc. 1, 97 hanc maximi animi aequitatem in ipsa morte. said of Theramenes' ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... reasonableness of saving our manufactures from sacrifices which a change of circumstances might bring on them, the national interest requires that, with respect to such articles at least as belong to our defense ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson
... days, was quite enthusiastic for the excursion. He calculated confidently upon our discovering a creek of fresh water, full of fishes and lobsters, and cited the history of the Swiss family Robinson, in support of the reasonableness of these expectations; declaring that for us part, he could not see why we might not count upon equal good fortune with them. Browne seemed indifferent about the matter. The little native, (whose name, upon Arthur's authority, I shall write "Eiulo," ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... save people, and then met the waves with a noble gesture. He had time to be reasonable; not instinctive. The world was the gainer, as he jolly well knew it would be—or where would have been the reasonableness? I don't believe Ferguson cared a hang about keeping his individual machine going for its own sake. But he knew he was a valuable person. His mind was a Kohinoor among minds. It stands to reason that you save the Kohinoor and let the little stones go. Well, that's not the story. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Spenser, preferred Tasso to Milton, and called the old English dramatists "mad and turbid mountebanks." In the same spirit he writes: "In the time of Pope it was all Horace, now it is all Claudian." He saw—what fanatics had begun to deny—that Pope was a great writer, and the "angel of reasonableness," the strong common sense of both was a link between them; but the expressions he uses during his controversy with Bowles look like jests, till we are convinced of his earnestness by his anger. "Neither time, nor distance, nor grief, nor age can ever diminish my veneration ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... use the chair he had shoved toward her. She stood beside it a little defiantly. Now she looked into his eyes with a kind of imperious reasonableness. "Whatever I was to you, Fectnor," she said, "I became because ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... was sufficiently expressive of the entire change in his demeanor, "to seek customers where there is a reputation for liberality. I hope my boldness will be overlooked, on account of its motive, and that you will aid the lady in judging of the value of my articles, and of their reasonableness as to price, with your ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... Benefit. There are Men who are of Opinion, that no positive Evil may be done or commanded, that Good may come of it, on any Account whatever: Should any one of these be in doubt whether there is not some Reasonableness or other Merit in this Law, besides its contributing to the Welfare of the Society; I would ask him, if it would not be an unpardonable Folly, nay a wicked Action in any Legislature, to enact, that a most abandon'd Wretch, who has been guilty of many Capital Crimes, should, without ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... Ferris, imperturbably, "you will see that there is probably a moment of anguish, perhaps not even that moment, and then your wife is here with you in the land of spirits. I am sure that is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Even a man in your state of mind must see the reasonableness of this. Now, looking at the question in what you would call its most serious aspect, see how little it amounts to. It isn't worth a moment's thought, whichever ...
— From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr
... questioning among ladies old and young, while yet unmarried, is thus finely defined by Jeremy Taylor:—"It is a voluntary cession that is required; such a cession as must be without coercion and violence on his part, but upon fair inducements and reasonableness in the thing, and out of love and honour on her part. When God commands us to love Him, He means we shall obey Him. 'This is love, that ye keep my commandments; and if ye love me,' says the Lord, 'keep my commandments.' Now as Christ ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... ours. Perhaps he did not really care for it perhaps he knew when he heard of it that it must come to him in the end. In the end it did, from my hand, for Clemens would not meet him. I found him in a mood of sweet reasonableness, perhaps the more softened by one of those lunches which our publisher, the hospitable James R. Osgood, was always bringing people together over in Boston. He said that he could not do the play that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... hopes that had been entertained gave poignancy to the sudden disappointment and grief, and the home children could not acquiesce in the dispensation with the same quiet reasonableness as those who had been so long separated from them as not to miss the gentle countenance, or the 'sweet toils, sweet cares, for ever gone.' Indeed Wilmet was physically much exhausted by her long hours of anxiety, and went ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not how to begin, but made many attempts to convey, in an indirect manner, the reasons for his being summoned to that day's conference. However, hints and insinuations were alike thrown away upon one who had determined neither to use eye's nor ears but as interest pointed out the reasonableness of so doing; and accordingly, unable longer to repress my impatience, I exclaimed abruptly, "Pray, sir, do you know who I am?" "Yes, madam," replied he, with a profound bow, and look of the deepest humility, "you are the comtesse du Barry." ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... come, Oswald, and you will then speedily come to consider that there are other things than the reasonableness of ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... binning, I am taken under the protecting wing of a prominent villager, who is walking about with his hand in a sling, the reason whereof is a crushed finger; he is a sensible, intelligent fellow, and accepts my reply that I am not a crushed-finger hakim with all reasonableness; he provides a substantial supper of bread and yaort, and then installs me in a small, windowless, unventilated apartment adjoining the buffalo- stall, provides me with quilts, lights a primitive grease-lamp, and retires. During the evening ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... often passed in silence in the modern pulpit, the plain fact that there is a future waiting for each of us beyond the grave, of which the most certain characteristic, certified by our own forebodings, required by the reasonableness of creation, and made plain by the revelation of Scripture, is that it is a future of retribution, where we shall have to carry our works; and as we have brewed so shall we drink; and the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... And the reasonableness of this view grows the clearer to us the more we realise the purposive character of the evolutionary process. The unmistakeable purpose of that process is the production of the higher from the lower; all ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... side, who are utterly against passive obedience even to the legislature; who will assert the last resort of power to be in the people, against those whom they have chosen and trusted as their representatives, with the prince at the head; and who will put wild improbable cases to shew the reasonableness and necessity of resisting the legislative power, in such imaginary junctures. Than which however nothing can be more idle; for I dare undertake in any system of government, either speculative or practic, that was ever yet in the world, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... and put us to shame. It is this universality of Daudet's satire that has given Tartarin its vogue on both sides of the Atlantic. The ingenuity of Tartarin's misadventures, the variety of them in Algiers and in Switzerland, the obvious reasonableness of them all, the delightful probability of these impossibilities, the frank gaiety and the unflagging high spirits,—these are precious qualities, all of them; but it is rather the essential humanness of Tartarin ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... shaken, the intuition which recognised in Beauty a superhuman, and, in that sense, a truly divine power. And now it must become evident that the methods of modern psychology, of the great new science of body and soul, are beginning to explain the reasonableness of this intuition, or, at all events, to show very plainly in what direction we must look for the explanation of it. This much can already be asserted, and can be indicated even to those least versed in recent ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... of the Parliament, the reasonableness of engaging in a war upon the Continent was taken into consideration, and admitted. Liberal supplies were granted, to enable the army, now collected in the King's Hanoverian dominions, to act with vigour, in conjunction with the King of Prussia. Supplies were also ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... carefully—the engineer was afraid lest he might run over somebody. It was strange to think that so much humane painstaking care and exertion was being introduced into the business of hanging people; that the most insane deed on earth was being committed with such an air of simplicity and reasonableness. The cars were running, and human beings sat in them as people always do, and they rode as people usually ride; and then there would ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... prejudices worked, to get at the nature and habits and strengths of each kind of prejudice, and to devise means for its treatment, destruction or neutralization. He had no great faith in the power of pure reasonableness; his psychological ideas were modern, and he had grasped the fact that the power of most of the great prejudices that strain humanity lies deeper than the intellectual level. Consequently he sought to bring himself into the closest contact with prejudices ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... he quickly marched off. And P'ing Erh was so impressed with the reasonableness of his arguments, that ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... said by a friend, and nothing which was not said by the Jews who had lost their faith in their God. It was but the putting into plain words of what 'common-sense' and faint faith had often whispered to Hezekiah. The very absence of temper or demand in the letter gives it an aspect of that 'sweet reasonableness' so dear ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... salient quality in all their institutions was reasonableness. When I dug into the records to follow out any line of development, that was the most astonishing thing—the conscious effort to ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... ministers of the North Carolina Synod for the reasons of the hope that is in them, or properly, for the proofs of their doctrines; and, agreeably to the last invitation given them, they might have had the opportunity of showing the reasonableness of their doctrines. Now as they have neglected to endeavor to convince us, why do they warn the people against us, especially since they are not willing to confront us in a public debate?" (42 f.) Henkel ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... to pronounce whether that which I can not apprehend exists or not, was that my fault, or theirs? There may be divine forces which created and govern the universe; but never talk to me of their goodness, and reasonableness, and care for human creatures! Can a reasonable being, who cares for the happiness of another, strew the place assigned to him to dwell in with snares and traps, or implant in his breast a hundred impulses of which the gratification only drags him into an abyss? Is ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... writing was taken to head-quarters and read, Julian, considering the reasonableness of the complaint, ordered that their families should go to the East with them, and allowed them the use of the public wagons for the purpose of moving them. And as it was for some time doubted which road they should take, he decided, at the suggestion of the secretary Decentius, ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... the kindred diseases arising from over-shelter and under-cleanliness of that shelter (lack of air). Both men and women are sentimental and non-progressive, but education is assumed to make wiser human beings. Women are said to be monopolizing the education; is it making them more amenable to reasonableness and less under the control ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... between the impulse to go on and the impulse to go back, that a puff of wind either way would have been well-nigh sufficient to decide for him. When he allowed John's story to repeat itself in his ears, the reasonableness and good sense of his advice seemed beyond question. When, on the other hand, he thought of his poor Matilda's eyes, and her, to him, pleasant ways, their charming arrangements to marry, and her probable willingness still, he could hardly bring himself to do otherwise ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... to me in saying, "Paris has become more French." Deprived of the foreigner, the city adapted itself to a taste more Gallic; faced with the realities of war, it exchanged its artificiality for that sober reasonableness which is the normal attitude ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... its grime and its nastiness. In the dream that he dreamed the difference between the woman who had adornment and the other sad one back there in the cottage was as nothing. The irritating paradox of life was reconciled: there was great reasonableness in things, and he had ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... and profound reasoner was most firmly attached to the Christian religion. His zeal to promote it appeared, first, in his middle age, by publishing a discourse to demonstrate the reasonableness of believing Jesus to be the promised Messiah; and, afterwards, in the latter part of his life, by a Commentary on several of the Epistles of the apostle Paul. The sacred Scriptures are every where mentioned by him with the greatest reverence; and ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... of the divining-rod were fully credited; the discovery of the philosopher's stone was daily hoped for; and electricity, magnetism, and other remarkable and misconceived phenomena were appealed to as proof of the reasonableness of their expectations. Until such phenomena were traced to their sources, imaginary and often mystical causes were assigned to them, for the same reason that, in the wilds of a partially discovered country, according to ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... says Sidgwick, [Footnote: The Methods of Ethics, Book I, chapter vi, Sec 1.] "is to render scientific—i.e., true, and as far as possible systematic—the apparent cognitions that most men have of the rightness or reasonableness of conduct, whether the conduct be considered as right in itself, or as the means to some end conceived as ultimately reasonable." The use here of the word "cognitions" calls our attention to the fact that, when men say, "this is right, that is wrong," they ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... likelihood of making converts. This is the more appropriate as he thinks the Founder of Christianity, and its chief promulgators, such as Peter and Paul, gained most of their successes through manner. "Mildness and sweet reasonableness" he believes to be the characteristic of Christ's teaching—a presentment of truths long afloat in the Jewish mind so winningly and persuasively that they became new and profound convictions in all minds; and he believes that when these ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... son was gone, sir Wilton began to miss him. He wished, first, that the obstinacy of the rascal had not made it necessary to give him quite so sharp a lesson; he wished, next, that he had given him time to see the reasonableness of his demand; and at length, as the days and weeks passed, and not a whisper of prayer entered the ears of the family-Baal, he began to wish that he had not sent him away. The desire to see him grew a longing; his need of him became imperative. Arthur, who now tried a little to do the work he had ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... a future bodily existence is its reasonableness. There is a law of gradation in the universe by which the seed unfolds gradually into the stalk, the bud into the flower, the flower into the fruit. We see a gradual progress of vegetable life into animal, and a gradual transition from the lower forms ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... Emperor. This portrait is in every way worthy of the master's reputation. If the first essential in a portrait is an exact likeness, this one possesses it to a very high degree. The head, which is admirably painted, expresses the indulgent and wise character, the gentleness and reasonableness, that are so conspicuous in the model; the eyes an expression, affectionate and paternal; the expression of the mouth is most striking; one feels that it can utter only words of peace, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... homeward under the stars, well content with his attempts at keeping the peace, he thought wistfully of the touch of Rebecca's head on his knee, and the rain of her tears on his hand; of the sweet reasonableness of her mind when she had the matter put rightly before her; of her quick decision when she had once seen the path of duty; of the touching hunger for love and understanding that were so characteristic in her. "Lord A'mighty!" he ejaculated under his breath, "Lord A'mighty! ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... portions, the kingdom to constitute one, and the wealth and treasures the other, and that Numitor should choose which portion he would have. This proposal seemed to have the appearance, at least, of reasonableness and impartiality; and it would have been really very reasonable, if the right to the inheritance thus disposed of, had belonged equally to the younger and to the elder son. But it did not. And thus the offer of Amulius was, in effect, a proposition to divide ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... hardly wonderful that such a method should incur the charge of sentimentalism. "It would be so nice to believe it, therefore it must be true," sounds like a shameless abandonment of reasonableness. The fact that a belief is "consoling," quite independently of its truth or falsehood, creates a bias towards its acceptance. That it is pleasant to believe oneself very clever and competent will incline one to that belief until something ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... pity in the sage, the Stoics themselves must have felt some difficulty there since we find Epictetus recommending his hearers to show grief out of sympathy for another, but to be careful not to feel it. The inexorability of the sage was a mere consequence of his calm reasonableness, which would lead him to take the right view from the first. Lastly, the sage would never be stirred to anger. For why should it stir his anger to see another in his ignorance ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... "authority" as a vague power far on into their adult life, if he is a forcible character. But it is at its best a shorn splendour he retains. He has ceased to be an autocrat and become a constitutional monarch; the State, sustained by the growing reasonableness of the world, intervenes more and more between him and the wife and children who were once powerless in ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... miners and backwoodsmen. If inoffensive people were ever to cast it aside, then wicked men would have everything their own way and make life intolerable. Fortunately the evil-doers always have the fear of this intangible six-shooter before them; a wholesome feeling, which restrains them more than reasonableness or the law courts, and to which we owe it that the meek are permitted to inherit the earth. But now this quarrel was with a whole nation, though certainly not with a very great one, since the population of the Banda Oriental numbers only about a quarter of a million. Yet ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... of the Scriptures into Gaelic, induced probably by the reasonableness and utility of the rule under consideration, by the example of the most polished Tongues, and by the usage of the Gaelic itself in some phrases, have uniformly adhered to this rule when the leading Noun was in the Genitive; ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... and civilised as herself, though she did not like Primrose, expect to see them tattooed. One of the party was no other than Dolores Mohun. She had been very happy with her father for three years. They had been at Kotorua at the time of the earthquake, and Dolores had acquired much credit for her reasonableness and self-possession, but there had been also a young lady, not much above her own age, who had needed protection and comfort, and the acquaintance there begun had ended in her father deciding on a marriage with a pretty gentle ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... case, by 1948 there was no hope for widespread reform through a step-by-step demonstration of the practicality and reasonableness of integration. Too much of the remaining opposition was emotional, rooted in prejudice and tradition, to yield to any but forceful methods. If the services were to be integrated in the short run, integration would have to be forced ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... these Monks, and I will tell them what is kept hid by Him who is their Friend. Lo! I will afflict these men of Religion by telling them the truth, and I will darken their spirit, uttering to them words of verity and reasonableness. I will plunge reflexion like a sword in their reins; and so soon as they shall know the reality of things, they will be unhappy. For joy there is none but in illusion, and peace is only to be found in ignorance. And because I am the Master of such as study the nature of plants ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... work with children reach out more to work with adults, to those who buy and sell and make books for the young? Is it not time for the successful teller of stories to children to use her gifts in audiences of grown people, persuading these molders of the children's future of the reasonableness of our objection to the third rate since it is the enemy of the best? May it not be politic, at least, for the librarian to descend from her disdainful height and make friends with "the trade," with bookseller and publisher who, after all, have as good a right to ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... difficult to resist the request, backed as it was with weight of character and grace of manner, along with its intrinsic reasonableness; and he saw no other way so expedient of ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Revolutionary thought "represented an attack on over- interference, vested interests, superstition, and tyranny of every form. It showed a marked propensity to ignore history, and to judge everything by its immediate reasonableness. It pictured a society free from all laws and coercion, freed from all clerical influence and ruled by benevolence, a society in which all men had equal rights and were able to attain the fullest self-realization. In its strictly educational aspects, it demanded the withdrawal of education from ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... reply? He had me on the matter of reasonableness. Besides, my head ached. And the funny thing, as I admitted it to myself, was that evolution teaches in no uncertain voice that man did run on all-fours ere he came to walk upright, that astronomy states flatly that the speed of ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... and goodness, justice and love, which He had shown, that they only needed to tell the children of it, and they would trust Him too, and at once have faith in so good a God. They showed that they had such trust in the excellencies, and reasonableness, and fitness of His Gospel, that they were sure that it would come home at once to the children's hearts. They showed that they had such trust in the power of His grace, in His love for the children, in the working of His Spirit in the children, that He would bring ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... the discussion of vivisection we are confronted by the plea of utility. If, to some extent, we may admit the reasonableness of the argument, yet such admission must be with certain definite reservations. The infliction of extreme pain either upon human beings or on animals for objects other than their own benefit—how far is it to be justified if some useful end is thereby achieved? The subject ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... invasion."—Nixon's Parser, p. 123. "If I say, 'I gallopped from Islington to Holloway;' the verb is intransitive: if, 'I gallopped my horse from Islington to Holloway;' it is transitive."—Churchill's Gram., p. 238. "The reasonableness of setting a part one day in seven."—The Friend, Vol. iv, p. 240. "The promoters of paper money making reprobated this act."—Webster's Essays, p. 196. "There are five compound personal pronouns, which are derived from the five simple personal ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... all convinced of the righteousness and reasonableness of majority rule—when we happen ...
— Crankisms • Lisle de Vaux Matthewman
... for the sake of complacency in your small dexterity: better, infinitely better, that you should be wholly uninterested in pictures, and uninformed respecting them, than that you should just know enough to detect blemishes in great works,—to give a color of reasonableness to presumption, and an appearance of acuteness to misunderstanding. Above all, I would plead for this so far as the teaching of these schools may be addressed to the junior Members of the University. Men employed in any kind of manual labor, by which ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... contraband, the destruction of neutral prizes, and continuous voyages. The declaration of London is an eminently satisfactory codification of the international maritime law, and it is hoped that its reasonableness and fairness will secure its general adoption, as well as remove one of the difficulties standing in the way of the establishment of an ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... not enter here into the Wisdom or Reasonableness of representing the Torments of Hell to be Fire, and that Fire to be a Commixture of Flame and Sulphur; it has pleased God to let the Horror of those eternal Agonies about a lost Heaven, be laid before ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... by the arm, and, gently extricating himself from the sort of crowd, walked off, leaving most of the company prepossessed in his favour, by the ease and apparent reasonableness of his demeanour. Sounds of depreciation, forming themselves indistinctly into something like the words, "my eye, and Betty Martin," did issue from the neckcloth of Sir Bingo, but they were not much attended to; for it had not escaped the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... intuitions on which ethics rests are not debatable, for they are not opinions we hazard but preferences we feel; and it can be neither correct nor incorrect to feel them. We may assert these preferences fiercely or with sweet reasonableness, and we may be more or less incapable of sympathising with the different preferences of others; about oysters we may be tolerant, like Mr. Russell, and about character intolerant; but that is already a great advance in ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... The reasonableness of this struck even Dale, distraught as he was, and the three settled down to discuss the possibility of rescue, of reprieve, or whatever seemed likely to put off the evil hour, if only ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... while there was a good deal said by all present. Mr. and Mrs. Canary at first scouted the reasonableness of the idea. But Mr. Gordon, being an engineer and, as Bob said, "up to all such problems," considered Betty's ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... immortality is not over the innate reasonableness of it: the universe is immeasurably more reasonable with it than without it; but over its practicability after the body is gone. We, in our immeasurable wisdom, don't see how it can work—we don't see how a universe ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... with respect all the more because he did not quite understand him. Moreover, Speranski, either because he appreciated the other's capacity or because he considered it necessary to win him to his side, showed off his dispassionate calm reasonableness before Prince Andrew and flattered him with that subtle flattery which goes hand in hand with self-assurance and consists in a tacit assumption that one's companion is the only man besides oneself capable of understanding the folly of the rest ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Parliament. He was a high Tory, and a great defender of the Church and its ejected ministers, one of whom, Dr. Thomas Morton, the learned theologian, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, died in his house in 1659. He wrote a discourse on the "Truth and Reasonableness of the Religion delivered by Jesus Christ," a Preface to Dr. Morton's work on Episcopacy, and a vindication of the Church of England against the attacks of the ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... instigation but of his own accord, to confide in me about you, did not often attend the senate during these discussions. It is true your last letter, as I could easily conceive, was very gratifying to him. To me, indeed, your reasonableness, or rather your extreme wisdom, seemed not only charming, but simply admirable. For by that letter you retained your hold on a man of lofty character, who was bound to you by the signal generosity of your conduct towards him, but who was entertaining ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... death, to become lord of Rimini; in the contemplation of which event, albeit he was rude in appearance and a cripple, Messer Guido desired him for a son-in-law above any one of his brothers. Discerning, therefore, the reasonableness of what his friend counselled, he secretly disposed matters according to his device; and a day being appointed, Polo, a brother of Gianciotto, came to Ravenna with full authority to espouse Madonna Francesca. Polo was a handsome man, very pleasant, and of a courteous breeding; and passing with ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... find the accommodation of the car insufficient," said Sir Richmond in a tone of extreme reasonableness, and I admit it is, we can easily hire a larger car in a place ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... ill-will prevailed, and brought such a mist before public affairs, that the offenders were not able to see the greatest mischiefs that can befall men. And as he was so bold, he seemed not to have kept himself out of danger, by speaking so freely; but the reasonableness of what he said moved men to regard him as having behaved himself with great manhood, and this at a proper time also, for which reason every one heard what he said with pleasure; and although they first took care of their own safety by keeping silent themselves, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... and all the other peculiarities of India, you have to think out how your proposals will work. Democracies do not always think how things will work. Sir Henry Cotton made a speech that interested and struck me by its moderation and reasonableness. He made a number of remarks in perfect good faith about officials, which I received in a chastened spirit, for he has been for a very long time a very distinguished official himself. Therefore, he ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... him down from high talk of "universal democracy" and "the good cause" by insisting on making the younger man explain what he really meant. And though Tom suffered under this severe treatment, in the end he generally came round to acknowledge the reasonableness of Hardy's methods ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... love would ever and anon come upon the sculptor, when his matured reflecting powers would insist upon informing him of the fearful lapse from reasonableness that lay in this infatuation. It threw him into a sweat. What if now, at last, he were doomed to do penance for his past emotional wanderings (in a material sense) by being chained in fatal fidelity to an object that his intellect despised? One night he dreamt that he saw ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... Reasonableness is the strongest mark in Vauvenargues' thinking; balance, evenness, purity of vision, penetration finely toned with indulgence. He is never betrayed into criticism of men from the point of view of immutable first principles. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... physical means of expression which we get in the combination of chorus, orchestra, and organ, we have attained the greatest sureness as well as the greatest wealth of musical expressiveness. And thus we may see the reasonableness of Dommer's opinion that in order to restrain instrumental music from ruining itself by meaningless extravagance, it is desirable that there should be a renaissance of vocal music, such as it was in the golden age of ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... his tone of almost elaborate reasonableness, expanded his view that it was impossible for husband and wife to have two different sets of friends;—let alone every other consideration, he explained, it wasn't convenient for them not to be about together, and as ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... see, Pyrophilus, the reasonableness of what we elsewhere had occasion to mention, when we have divers times told you, that it is usefull to have New Experiments try'd over again, though they were, at first, made by Knowing and Candid Men, such Reiterations of Experiments commonly exhibiting some New ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... adverse armies were in that condition, relatively to each other, that none of the Generals has pleaded any difference of opinion as to their ability to advance against the enemy, I will ask what confirmation has appeared before the Board of Inquiry, of the reasonableness of the causes, assigned by Sir Hew Dalrymple in his letter, for deeming a Convention adviseable. A want of cavalry, (for which they who occasioned it are heavily censurable,) has indeed been proved; and certain failures ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Peter, but I see the reasonableness of them all, and promise—at least I promise ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... to hold up the hands of their governments in the friendly commerce of diplomacy, rather than to urge them on to strife; and let there go to the herdsman and the husbandman and the merchant and the student and the boy in the street every influence which can tend toward that sweet reasonableness, that kindly sentiment, that breadth of feeling for humanity, that consideration for the rights of others, which lie at the basis of ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... Are they ours only because they are necessarily caused to exist in our minds? If so, then indeed we understand these writers; but if they are not merely passive impressions, why resort to states of the intelligence and the sensibility, which are conceded to be passive, in order to illustrate the reasonableness of their scheme, and to expose the unreasonableness of the opposite doctrine? We admit that every passive impression is caused; but the question is, Can the mind be caused to act? As we lay all the stress on the nature of an act, as seen in the light ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... Bagsby's ideas of proper compensation were his supplies, fifteen dollars a week in gold, and a drink of whiskey twice a day! In all this gold country he was the only man I met who genuinely despised money. I really think we were hurried to our decision by this unexpected reasonableness on his part. At any rate we ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... circumstances two days before. The night had been cold and damp; the grass was found wet in the places sheltered from the current of wind, which had elsewhere formed hoarfrost over the field. This reminded us of the elevation we had reached to; and we all exclaimed as to the reasonableness of Jacob's expostulation with Laban, when he asserted that "in the day the drought [or heat] consumed him, and the frost by night," (Gen. xxxi. 40.) We were upon frozen ground in the month of May, after passing through a flight of locusts on ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... passage about the atonement escaped notice for twenty years, till a notable divine, Archbishop Magee, in entire ignorance of the suppression, quoted the passage from one of the earlier editions as a strong testimony to the reasonableness of the Scriptural doctrine of the atonement from a man whose intellectual capacity and independence were above all dispute. "Such," he says, "are the reflections of a man whose powers of thinking and reasoning will surely not be pronounced inferior to those of any, even of ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... and standing on a bank near where he laid, fired a few shots in the direction of his long-since departed comrades and then called out to him, "Hands up!" His reply, as he told me, struck me as quaint and natural, "'Ow can I 'old my 'ands up?" And seeing the reasonableness of his remark, they took his water bottle and left him where our surgeon found him. From Pretoria I have acquired quite a number of books, including half-a-dozen of Stevenson's. At present I am re-reading his ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... resolutions, to compel them to observe, for example, a non-importation agreement? This was a delicate question upon which opinion was divided. "We have no legal authority," said Mr. Rutledge, "and obedience to our determinations will only follow the reasonableness, the apparent utility, and necessity of the measures we adopt. We have no coercive or legislative authority." If this was so, the non-intercourse policy would doubtless prove a broken reed. Massachusetts men were ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... you are evidently a man of education, of early refinement; you have known better things; and I have come to you seeking merely to aid you in deciding this helpless young woman's destiny. I thought, I prayed, you would be at once interested in that purpose, and would comprehend the reasonableness of ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... and she moved with greatest ease in the regions which most of her rivals carefully avoided. To throw out those scintillant bubbles of sound which used to be looked upon as the highest achievement in singing seemed to be an entirely natural mode of expression with her. With the reasonableness of such a mode of expression I am not concerned now; it is enough that Mme. Melba came nearer to providing it with justification than any one of her contemporaries of that day, except Mme. Sembrich, or any of her contemporaries of to-day. Added to these gifts ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... does not consider an atom of oxygen as in itself important, yet if it wishes to get a volume of pure gas, it must separate the elements. The human soul was an atom that could unite with God only as a simple element. The French mystics showed in their mysticism the same French reasonableness; the sense of measure, of logic, of science; the allegiance to form; the transparency of thought, which the French mind has always shown on its surface like a shell of nacre. The mystics were in substance rather more logical than the schoolmen and much more artistic in their correctness ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... placed here for trial—endowed with powers sufficient to render him a probationer; which implies capacity to use, or abuse his powers. The abuse is sin. The way of duty is made known, needed assistance conferred, the reasonableness of obedience shewn, and the injunction, "occupy; till I come," subjoined, but no compulsion is used. Thus circumstanced, it is referred to man to choose ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... Thibet,—the land, above all others, of occult science,—into communication with the true Chinese, and the other, through their tradition, with the lost race of the Atlantic, the asserted history of the fourth root-race of humanity assumes a very attractive degree of reasonableness. ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... is grateful. No matter that it comes unsought, and comes not for the seeking. You do not discuss the reasonableness of your gratitude. You only know that your whole being bows with humility and utter thankfulness to him who thus crowns you ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... besides, they at this day shall be convinced that there was so much reality, and downright willingness in God, in every tender of grace and mercy to the worst of men, and also so much goodness, justness, and reasonableness in every command of the gospel of grace, which they were so often entreated and beseeched to embrace, that they will be drowned in the conviction of this, that they did refuse love, grace, and reason—love, ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... if feeling she must take from him in common kindness at least as much as she would make him take, and the serious anxious patience such a consciousness gave her tone was met by Mitchy with a charmed reasonableness that his habit of hyperbole did nothing to misrepresent. He glowed at her with the fullest recognition that there was something he was there to discuss with her, but with the assurance in every soft sound of him that no height to which ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... of the sea began to fail. The racing lop, the eager, fuming crests—a black-and-white confusion beneath the quiet, gray fog—subsided into reasonableness. 'Twas wild enough, wind and sea, beyond the tickle rocks; but still 'twas fishing weather and water for ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... reply, but his gaze was on the billowing waste of snow, which stretched as far as eye could see to the pine-hills in the far distance. He nodded assent, but it was plain to be seen that the Young Doctor's suggestion was not in tune with his thought. His nod only acknowledged the reasonableness of the proposal. In his eyes, however, was the wanderlust which had possessed him for three long years, in which he had been searching for what to him was more than Eldorado, for it was hope and home. Hope was all he had left of the assets which had made him so ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of Lord Saxingham, etc.; he rejoiced that Lord Vargrave's absence from London had prevented his being prematurely mixed up, by false scruples of honour, in secessions which his judgment must condemn. He treated of the question in dispute with the most delicate address,—confessed the reasonableness of Lord Vargrave's former opposition to it; but contended that it was now, if not wise, inevitable. He said nothing of the justice of the measure he proposed to adopt, but much on the expediency. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... quite acquiesces—that as he approaches the reverend period of nine or say ten years, he should still be the unabashed and proclaimed possessor of a hoop and a Noah's Ark. The child will quite see the reasonableness of this, and, the goal of his ambition being now a catapult, a pistol, or even a sword-stick, will be satisfied that the titular ownership should lapse to his juniors, so far below him in their kilted or petticoated incompetence. After all, the things are still there, and if ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... postponed a whole week for Calesford: the utmost possible strain; and her presence was understood to represent the Countess of Fleetwood, temporarily in decorous retirement. Chillon was assured by her that the earl had expressed himself satisfied with his wife's reasonableness. 'The rest will follow.' Pleading on the earl's behalf was a vain effort, but she had her grounds for painting Lord Fleetwood's present mood to his countess in warm colours. 'Nothing short of devotion, Chillon!' London's extreme anxiety to see them united, and the cause of it, the immense ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... can get cultured clams, intellectual chowder, refined lager, and very scientific pork and beans. It is far superior to our monotonous sand-beach in its picturesqueness of natural beauty, in the American character of the visitors, and in the reasonableness of hotel charges, as well as the excellence ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various
... eyes see the world and all its allurements from the windows of Zura's uncontrolled youth. Earnestly I then appealed to her to try to understand that life was a school and not a playground and to look without prejudice at the reasonableness of conventions which life in any country demanded, if happiness ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... discuss the reasonableness of his or your demands, but it seems that a statement of his prospects is owing ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... animals, and he showed for the first time that the latter have an evolutionary significance. Because his logical assembly of wide series of facts in this and later volumes did so much to convince the intellectual world of the reasonableness of evolution, Darwin is usually and wrongly hailed as the founder of the doctrine. It is interesting to note in passing that Alfred Russel Wallace presented a precisely similar outline of nature's workings at about the same ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... of Octavia, who swooned at 'Tu, Marcellus, eris,'—or of Wives for their Husbands, as Artemisia and Laodamia, sometimes amounting to Idolatry—nay, the Love of Friend for Friend, with alle its sweet Influences and animating Transports, yet exceeding the Reasonableness of that of David for Jonathan, or of our blessed Lord for St. John and the Family of Lazarus, may procure far more Torment than Profit: even if the Attachment be reciprocal, and well grounded, and equallie matcht, which often it is not. Then interpose human ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions.[16] Prudence and justice are virtues and excellences of all times, and of all places—we are perpetually moralists; but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... detail, and all aiming at the increase of pleasure and the diminution of pain. The Abbe's nimble intelligence had a weak side, which must have somewhat compromised his influence. He was so confident in the reasonableness of his projects that he always believed that if they were fairly considered the ruling powers could not fail to adopt them in their own interests. It is the nature of a reformer to be sanguine, but the optimism of Saint-Pierre touched naivete. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... how to meet it with a degree of that "sweet reasonableness" which should invest one's daily living, is knowledge that can hardly come amiss. One must treat it as ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... chalousie vissout cause, san cause vissout chalousie;" and that even while I was witness of the profound ferocity of his jealousy when roused, and more and more as time passed on, I was impressed with its sweet reasonableness. ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... encomium, involving more of flattery to a man's foibles than of credit to his discretion and his judgment. But at the time when the quarrel between Great Britain and her colonies was fast becoming imbittered, the same kindliness, coupled with a calm reasonableness of temper, ruled his feelings and guided his action. Although by political creed a moderate Tory, he had none of the wrong-headedness of the party zealot; and the growing alienation between those whom he, like his brother, regarded as of one family, caused only distress and an earnest desire ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... whose facts prove unreliable and whose mental attitude suggests a somewhat querulous bias, but it is only fair to remind ourselves that after long internment all suffer from nerve strain and many suffer very severely. Under these circumstances complete reasonableness is probably more than any of us would be ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... opposition to our views, ever felt the slightest difficulty. They were both "Immaterialists," because they both discerned the radical difference between mental and material phenomena, and because they both admitted the reasonableness of ascribing them, respectively, to a distinct substance. But they were not convinced by the more metaphysical arguments of those who professed to show that none of the phenomena of "mind" could possibly be exhibited by matter, or, at least, they declined to take that ground. That Locke was ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... about by men who had already striven to preserve the rights of property acquired under the Clergy Reserve grants, rather than by those whose policy was little {39} short of spoliation. The propriety and reasonableness of all this was very generally recognized at the time, not merely by the supporters of MacNab and Macdonald, but also by their political opponents. A. A. Dorion, the Rouge leader, considered the alliance quite natural. Robert Baldwin and Francis Hincks both publicly defended it, and their course ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... aware of Blackstone's admirable demonstration of the reasonableness of the legal succession, upon the principle of there being the greatest probability that the nearest heir of the person who last dies proprietor of an estate, is of the blood of the first purchaser. But supposing ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... college, whom he continually exhorted to perseverance in study. Amidst all the pleasures of novelty which his travels supplied, and in the dignity of his publick station, he preferred the tranquillity of private study, and the quiet of academical retirement. The reasonableness of this choice has been always disputed; and in the contrariety of human interests and dispositions, the controversy will ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... reason for rebellion. During the last years they had gone drearily around and around the circle which they felt closing so inexorably upon them, and there was no longer any use to wear themselves out in futile discussions of impossible plans. They had both been trained to regard reasonableness as one of the cardinal virtues, and to the mild nature of the old man it was a natural one, so they tried conscientiously to force themselves not only to act, but to feel, "like sensible folks," as they put ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... party had no explanation to offer for the round-up, but when Rebstock made it known that the fight was over sending out Du Sang, the rage of the rustlers turned on Du Sang. Again, however, no man wanted to take up personally with Du Sang the question of the reasonableness of Whispering Smith's demand. Instead of doing so, they fell on Rebstock and demanded that if he were boss he make good and ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... which has not a particle of force after leaving the vocal cords, can be directed against the hard palate with an impact sufficient to affect tone quality is the limit of absurdity. If the writer had spoken of directing the sound waves to the front of the mouth there would have been an element of reasonableness in it, for sound waves can be reflected as well as light waves; but breath and sound are ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... passing tiff. All you need in these matters is a little give and take, a bit of reasonableness on both sides. We got together and talked things over. She withdrew my double chin. I conceded her shark. Perfectly simple. All done ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... he that was far behind in austerity, perchance through bodily weakness, would disparage and blame himself, attributing his failure to slothfulness of mind rather than to natural frailty. So each excelled each, and all excelled all in this sweet reasonableness. But the spirit of vain glory and pleasing of men—what place had it among them? For they had fled from the world, and were dwelling in the desert, to the end that they might show their virtues not to men, but to God, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... raised her head for the moment, but soon let it sink again in her musings, and when Bennet reminded her, replied, "I can't, Bennet, it breaks my neck." Her will was not with her mother's, in a trifling matter of which the reasonableness could not but approve itself to her. How, then, was it likely to be bent to that of her Heavenly Parent, in ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tearful glance, in which defiance, reproach, determination, and a certain cruelty shone like iron under water. He made a movement toward her. The strength of his more emotional nature might have made a final assault—not uselessly—on her assumed "reasonableness." No appeal, no threat could have moved her from the mental attitude she had decided on—the duty of keeping her word to Lord Reckage. But she might have been urged to the more candid course of ascertaining how far his lordship's true happiness was really involved ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... her; but displays of personal sentiment secretly embarrass her: passion in her is humanitarian rather than human: she feels strongly about social questions and principles, not about persons. Only, one observes that this reasonableness and intense personal privacy, which leaves her relations with Gloria and Phil much as they might be between her and the children of any other woman, breaks down in the case of Dolly. Though almost every word she addresses to her is necessarily ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... appears to the Government to be the most impartial, just, and most satisfactory way out of the existing difficulty, and, lastly, because one of the parties to a Convention, according to all principles of reasonableness, cannot expect that his interpretation will be respected by the other party as the only valid and correct one. And although this Government is firmly convinced that a just and impartial decision might be obtained even better in South Africa than anywhere else, it wishes, in view of ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... something, without any very distinct idea of what is to be done. But even that suspicion wronged Malcolmson. Either he or some one else had devised an effective counterplot; effective considered as a second act in a comic opera. Perhaps I ought not to say comic opera. There is a certain reasonableness in the schemes of every comic opera. Our affairs in the early part of 1914 were moving through an atmosphere like that of "Alice in Wonderland." The Government was a sort of Duchess, affecting to regard Ulster as the baby which was beaten when it sneezed because ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... Morea, the sign of revolution. This, then, is coming to a plain, practical result. The Grecian revolution has been discouraged, discountenanced, and denounced, solely because it is a revolution. Independent of all inquiry into the reasonableness of its causes or the enormity of the oppression which produced it; regardless of the peculiar claims which Greece possesses upon the civilized world; and regardless of what has been their own conduct towards her for a century; regardless of the interest of the Christian ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... authenticity? Do the contents of the books themselves commend them as credible to our intelligence? It is possible that, although the historical evidence authenticating them be somewhat defective, yet the thorough coherency and reasonableness of the books may induce us to consider them as reliable; or, if the latter points be lacking from the supernatural character of the occurrences related, yet the evidence of authenticity may be so overwhelming as to place the accuracy ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... masculine character and comfort if this shyness should become general, as it may in a contingency that is already on the horizon? We refer, of course, to the suggestion, coming from various quarters, that women should propose. The reasonableness of this suggestion may not lie on the surface; it may not be deduced from the uniform practice, beginning with the primitive men and women; it may not be inferred from the open nature of the two sexes (for the sake of argument two sexes must still be ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... exportation of different articles grown or manufactured in either country, they petitioned, and even set up a claim, which was granted, to be heard by counsel and to produce witnesses. But Pitt steadily refused the least modification of this part of his measure, not merely on account of its intrinsic reasonableness and justice, but because there was scarcely any condition to which the Irish themselves attached ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... is from an amusing book called The Academy, which, for all I know, is the first real boy's school-book ever written. Its companion is The Rector, and together they describe, with no little spirit and reasonableness, a school a hundred years ago, with all the escapades and errors of the boys and all the homilies of the schoolmaster. I like the episode of Scourhill as well as any because of the pleasant interior which it contains—Scourhill's home, ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... at least, the reasonableness of the proposed allowance for the expenses of the banking and insurance departments of the business, we have before us the problem how to equitably adjust the burden among the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 787, January 31, 1891 • Various
... that now the art is lost of moving men's passions, so common among the ancient orators of Greece and Rome. These, and the like objections, are frequently in the mouths of men who despise the "foolishness of preaching." But let us examine the reasonableness of them. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... seeing that every remark, made by Pao-ch'ai, contained so much reasonableness that he could with difficulty refute it, and that her words were even harder for him to reply to than were those uttered by his mother, he was consequently bent upon contriving a plan to make use of such language as could ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... books and his temple; and the creed of the red men naturally became his. But such were the truth, simplicity, and kindness of his character, there can be but little doubt, had the gospel of the Son of God been proposed to him, in its sublime truth and reasonableness, that he would have added to all his other virtues, the ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... the speech of Woodin that the anti-Grant forces had the reasonableness of the argument, but the acceptance of the Utica instructions put delegates in a delicate position. To say that Conkling had "tricked" them into a pledge which the convention had no authority to exact,[1680] ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... contain it, to go a step further, and to reject some things which seem palpably ill-reasoned, distasteful, inconsistent, or immoral?' 'Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.' For ourselves, we honestly confess we cannot see the logical consistency of such a position; any more than the reasonableness, after having admitted the preponderant evidence for the great truth of Theism, of excepting some phenomena as apparently at variance with the Divine perfections; and thus virtually adopting a Manichaean hypothesis. ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... Of Johnson's reasonableness nothing need be said, except that it is patent everywhere. His wife's judgment was a sound one—"He is the most sensible man ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... when facts were before him. The army, he wrote to Hood, is harassed to death, and he notices that it suffers from sickness far more than do the seamen. He repeats the request for more seamen, and, although he seems to doubt the reasonableness of the demand, evidently thinks that they should be furnished, if possible. Hood accordingly sent an additional detachment of three hundred, raising the number on shore to the five hundred suggested by Moore. "I had much rather," he wrote, "that a hundred seamen should be ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... seek to give that impression. But it's not a fair one. The absurdities of paganism, monkish legends, and even the plausible errors of the Romish Church, will not endure the light of intelligent education; but the more I know the more I see the beauty and perfection of the Christian religion and the reasonableness of prayer, and so it is with far stronger and wiser heads than mine. Your father and mine were never men to be imposed upon, nor to believe anything just because they were told to ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... upon the jury the reasonableness of this disposition, Clark said: "This, gentlemen of the jury, is another striking illustration of the power of human friendship. All history—sacred and profane—is full of instances of strong personal attachments. Who can ever forget the ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... came to fetch her, nor sent any writing to tell of the causes for his delay. The girl was fruitful of new reasons for his silence, and then grew a black fear which answered all doubts and, by its reasonableness, terrified her. Perhaps "Mister Jan" was ill—too ill even to write. He had but little strength—that she knew, and few friends—of that Joan was also aware, for he had told her so. Yet, surely, there were those, if only his servants, ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... by the apparent reasonableness of the adage, that if you want a thing well done you should do it yourself. In committing a murder it is always advisable to have some one else to do it for you, but the Prince's plans had been several times interfered with by the cowardice or inefficiency of his emissaries, so on one unfortunate ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... Novelist as earnestly as possible, urging him to append to the Reading as it then stood some fragmentary portion, at least, of the chapter descriptive of the flight, so that the remorseful horror of Sikes might be more fully realised. Of the reasonableness of this objection, however, Dickens himself was so wholly unconvinced, that, in the midst of his arguments against it, he wrote, in a tone of good-humoured indignation, "My dear fellow, believe me ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... pleasingly irrefutable. Sometimes the discussion turned on Art—on points of colour or technique; whether realism was quite justified; and should we be pre-Raphaelites? When these discussions started, Christian's eyes would grow bigger and clearer, with a sort of shining reasonableness; as though they were trying to see into the depths. And Harz would stare at them. But the look in those eyes eluded him, as if they had no more meaning than Mrs. Decie's, which, with their pale, watchful smile, always seemed saying: "Come, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... what Mr. Gladstone has to say; indeed she could never be brought to look upon politics as of serious concern for grown folk (a class in which she scarcely included man), and she gratefully gave up reading 'leaders' the day I ceased to write them. But like want of reasonableness, a love for having the last word, want of humour and the like, politics were in her opinion a mannish attribute to be tolerated, and Gladstone was the name of the something which makes all our sex such queer characters. She had a profound faith in him as an aid to ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... Service, Pain and Sorrow, Peace and Joy, and the Indwelling Christ. She was dissatisfied with the work and required some persuasion before she would consent to its being published. But its spiritual tone, its tenderness, its "sweet reasonableness," and the bright little pictures of Christian truth and life, which enliven its pages, have led some to prize it more than ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... of Penrod, this question was without meaning or reasonableness. It was within neither his power nor his desire to analyze the process by which the phrase had become offensive to him, and was now rapidly assuming the proportions of an outrage. He knew only that his gorge rose ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... when the house is quiet, and there's no racket nor disturbance about me.' Now though Kearney said this with a perfect conviction of its truth and reasonableness, it would have been very difficult for any one to say in what that racket he spoke of consisted, or wherein the quietude of even midnight was greater than that which prevailed there at noonday. Never, perhaps, were lives more completely still or monotonous than theirs. People ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... These imps, as they were called, were accustomed to visit their mistress once in twenty-four hours. If the witch, said her persecutors, could be put naked upon a chair in the middle of the room and kept awake, the imps could not approach her. Herein lay the supposed reasonableness of the methods in vogue. And the authorities who were offering this excuse for their use of torture were not loth to go further. It was, they said, necessary to walk the creatures in order to keep them ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... Committee of Five, and to disband them after they had started upon their work, substituting other individuals in their places, would merely stimulate fresh antagonism that might wreck the entire project. The fact that these men were dealers in outside properties especially fitted them to pass upon the reasonableness of the prices that were to be made, and there was no more reason to question their integrity of purpose than there would be to doubt that of any individuals who ...
— The New York Stock Exchange in the Crisis of 1914 • Henry George Stebbins Noble
... note of reasonableness into her voice. "If you'd told me we were going everywhere at the wrong time, of course I could have ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... aversion of the king, of Windham and other important personages in the government against the plans of Pitt. The prudence of their drift must be settled by external considerations. Those who think that the French were likely to show a moderation and practical reasonableness in success, such as they had never shown in the hour of imminent ruin, will find Burke's judgment full of error and mischief. Those, on the contrary, who think that the nation which was on the very eve of surrendering itself to the Napoleonic absolutism was not in a hopeful humour for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... accretions, the way to get clear of these is not to neglect the entire body of fathers, commentators, and theologians, and to give the whole attention to the scriptural text. Locke himself set an example of this attempt. He proposed, in his "Reasonableness of Christianity," to ascertain the exact meaning of the New Testament, by casting aside all the glosses of commentators and divines, and applying his own unassisted judgment to spell out its teachings. He did not ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... multitude do actually receive religion on authority, or on the word of others. I reply, that a faith so received seems to me of little worth. The precious, the living, the effectual part of a poor man's faith, is that of which he sees the reasonableness and excellence; that which approves itself to his intelligence, his conscience, his heart; that which answers to deep wants in his own soul, and of which he has the witness in his own inward and outward experience. All other parts of his belief, those which he takes ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Assembly, "that a great many persons here are enemies of mine." "All! All!" shriek hundreds of voices: enough to drown any People's-Friend. But Marat will not drown: he speaks and croaks explanation; croaks with such reasonableness, air of sincerity, that repentant pity smothers anger, and the shrieks subside or even become applauses. For this Convention is unfortunately the crankest of machines: it shall be pointing eastward, with stiff violence, this moment; and then do but ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle |
